So, Joe is in full Halloween mode. And he is creating, essentially, an illustrated "graveyard" in the basement, a sort of stations-of-the-holiday environment in which many creatures who might be interpreted as scary are being drawn and posted strategically throughout.

Fear not: I am not going to put up pictures of all of the creatures. I am sparing you Zeus, with his thunderbolt; Thor, with his hammer. I am not including Medusa, who has many fine snakes springing out of her head, although their smiley faces are more than a little disconcerting. Nope, I am avoiding the skeleton, and the witch, and I am not putting up the vampitre, although he is scary, or the two monsters. Or the sea monster, who does NOT look happy.

I am, instead, putting up two images. One, because I am so proud of my son I could burst. This is the centaur, which Joe persists in pronouncing "centataur," and which carries a bow. Joe is 4, and I am convinced, now, they he shows the skill of a draftsman. To the easel!

This centaur is actually recognizable, I think, and though its bow is small, I think the idea gets across. (I have read the Greeks may have had the Mongols for inspiration, as they carried bows on horseback and were such excellent horsemen that they may have seemed part of their steeds.)

The second is this picture of a space alien. Now, as aliens go, this is just what it is. But what fascinates me is that in this picture, Joe has included a speech balloon. The alien, he said, is "shouting 'Joe!!!!' "

Joe has included a SPEECH BALLOON. He has adopted the visual vocabulary of the comic strip and the comic book. This is shocking, to me, although for no good reason. He grasps the way a speech balloon works before he has fully grasped spelling and writing. As you see here, in fact, the alien is shouting "EOJ." Joe gets what a speech balloon is before he can fully spell, or commit to left-to-right letter and word order. (The minotaur, unpictured, has a red line inserted near his mouth to indicate a rageful shout.)

We are SUCH strange creatures, hurtling through space, magic and weird and filled with miracles. I am so grateful for the arc.

A slough is a thing of beauty. It was at a little slough, headed with some rubble for erosion control, that I saw some blue-gray gnat catchers. I know that they must wrestle for food, that they strive to eat, that they strive to migrate at the right moment, that they’re no Disney songbird from Snow White. But it is in us to love, and I have not seen a gnatcatcher in far too long. I remember a pair in Omaha at Neale Woods where the steward had found a nest. (He was very proud, and had every right to be.) I adored them until they flew off.

Also, I saw a palm warbler, bobbing his tail like he’s supposed to do, near the pretend beach pool. He stared back at me. Birds have such black, black eyes. Implacable is only a beginning for saying what they look like. Button is just a beginning. Glossy, deep, pitch, and lovely. He worked a few branches and moved on.

And in a very tall pine, high up, I saw the red-shouldered hawk sent by (as my friend Jim might say) Central Casting. I had wondered where the predators were, and there he was, announced by his “kee-ah kee-ah” as he loped in on wings. And then a great egret, incandescently yellow-eyed and unmoved by me, cocking his neck at some movement beneath his log, the white length of it kinking like flexible metal conduit.

The rain fell, and fell, and fell. The mushrooms became commonplace. There were orange fungi or slime molds or something sprouting out of the lichens in the weedy field down by the pond, and perfect toadstools in the woods, and delicate capped mushrooms angling out of the rotted bits of the firewood. The healthy pieces of firewood had smears of bright slick fungal ichor along even the faces of firm red oaken fiber. Water coursed in waves down the driveway. The safflower seed was translucent with waterlogging.

The light was so flat under an overcast sky that we found a yellow-rumped warbler, stunned, resting in a perfect crouch on the concrete porch, the first significant window strike. We threw a dishtowel over it and lifted it carefully; it mustered a wet chip and bounced into the weeping cherry. The woods were so wet that the dawn song of a Carolina wren sounded like a boom box amplification of a Lang Elliot CD. I heard a spring peeper in the woods calling evening, dawn, and night, and disbelieved my ears. One evening while the rain kept falling, and falling, and while the hot water heater ruptured downstairs, I found a peeper (the same?) crawling up the house in search, I assume, of somewhere dry enough for a frog to live. Carol found salamanders under the toy bin; I found them under the firewood.

One day, Joe and I walked through wet meadows at the headwaters of the pond, and we saw a miserable red-tailed hawk perched on an electric power stanchion. Its wings were half spread in supplication to the falling water, which made it look like a cormorant on a pier. By the time Joe and I had walked back home that day, he was so wet his socks needed to be wrung out. We had found a chunk of bone from a fox-killed goose we saw dead at the pond last year. Joe calls it The Unfortunate Goose, which it surely was, although Carol did point out that it left behind it a Fortunate Fox. The acorns we dropped in a wooden bowl as a keepsake waited a day or two before disgorging acorn maggots. The leaves we carried wrinkled up, some of them. And STILL the rain came down.

This morning, after 8 days, the rain stopped. The sun came out, after a fashion, and Carol and I found an enormous water beetle in the driveway. What was it doing? she asked. Probably flying overhead looking for water, I said. Looking for water? she said, and if ever there were a rhetorical question, hers was it.

Talking to Joe in the car today. Joe: "A big duck up on a tree." Is that funny?Dad: Not really. Joe: Tell me how to be funny.Dad: It's not that easy, really. Funny's hard. Joe: Well, how can you be funny?Dad: Well, you try to find out what other people think is funny, and then do something that's similar but different enough so it seems new. And it has to seem funny to you, too. Joe: What I think is funny is a ghost and some poop.

Scott McCloudProbably the best-known thinker about comic strips/books/graphic novels/sequential art working right now. Controversial among comic fans but unequivocally an influential and original thinker.